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When speakers name multiple semantically related items, opposing effects can be found. Semantic facilitation is found when naming 2 semantically related items in a row. In contrast, semantic interference is found when speakers name semantically related items separated by 1 or more intervening unrelated items. This latter form of interference is cumulative, as it increases as a function of the number of related items that have been named beforehand. Semantic facilitation has therefore been envisaged as a product of transient and fast-decaying activation of related representations, whereas semantic interference has been linked to longer-lasting changes in the connections between semantic and lexical representations. In this work we attempted to explore and compare the 2 phenomena jointly, by means of contrasting naming sequences with noncontiguous semantically related items and sequences with contiguous semantically related items. Results provide evidence that mechanisms responsible for semantic facilitation and interference may jointly occur in parallel, producing opposing influences on behavior. Importantly, semantic facilitation may exhibit cumulative features too, though these are immediately disrupted when unrelated items intervene. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).)

Verbal reasoning is a complex, multicomponent function, which involves activation of functional processes and neural circuits distributed in both brain hemispheres. Thus, this ability is often impaired after brain injury. The aim of the present study is to describe the construction of a new verbal reasoning test (VRT) for patients with brain injury and to provide normative values in a sample of healthy Italian participants. Three hundred and eighty healthy Italian subjects (193 women and 187 men) of different ages (range 16-75 years) and educational level (primary school to postgraduate degree) underwent the VRT. VRT is composed of seven subtests, investigating seven different domains. Multiple linear regression analysis revealed a significant effect of age and education on the participants' performance in terms of both VRT total score and all seven subtest scores. No gender effect was found. A correction grid for raw scores was built from the linear equation derived from the scores. Inferential cut-off scores were estimated using a non-parametric technique, and equivalent scores were computed. We also provided a grid for the correction of results by z scores.

In this study, we investigated how activation unfolds in sign production by examining whether signs that are not produced have their representations activated by semantics (cascading of activation). Deaf signers were tested with a picture-picture interference task. Participants were presented with pairs of overlapping pictures and named the green picture (target) while ignoring the red picture (distractor). In Experiment 1 we varied whether target and distractor pictures had similar signs. Signs were produced faster with sign-related picture pairs compared to unrelated picture pairs. The facilitation observed with sign-related pairs replicates the 1 obtained in speaking with sound-related pairs (e.g., bed-bell), a finding cited in support of cascading of activation. In Experiments 2A and 2B we focused on sign iconicity, anticipating that cascading of activation would lead to a facilitatory effect of iconicity. Consistent with this prediction, picture distractors with iconic signs induced faster responses. Furthermore, in Experiment 3, facilitation was found for iconic signs in picture naming. Altogether, our results reveal that cascading of activation is a fundamental aspect of language processing that is at play not only in speaking, but also in signing. Our results also help to define which signs are activated in sign production. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).)

Background: Vagal nerve stimulation (VNS) response is not immediate. A progressive decline in seizure frequency is usually found during a period of 12-18 months after implantation. During this time, the patient's medication is usually modified, which can create doubts about whether their clinical improvement is due to medication changes or to VNS itself. Our goal is to compare two groups of patients treated with VNS, with and without changes in their medication., Methods: We prospectively analyze 85 patients who were treated with VNS in our hospital between 2005 and 2014. In 43 patients, changes in the antiepileptic drugs (EAD) were not allowed during the postoperative follow-up and they were compared with 42 patients who were left at the option of neurologist make changes in medication. We analyzed the clinical situation at 18 months and compared the two groups., Results: Overall, 54.1% of patients had a reduction in seizures of 50% or higher (responders). In the group with no changes in medication, responders reached 63%, while in the group in which changes in medication were allowed, 45.2% were responders. Between responders and non-responders, there were no statistical differences in type of epilepsy, frequency, previous surgery, or intensity of stimulation., Conclusions: We did not find a statistical difference in seizure frequency reduction between patients with or without changes in medication during their follow-up, so changes in medication did not improve the outcome. Furthermore, the absence of changes in AED can help to optimize the parameters of the stimulator in order to improve its effectiveness.

High-frequency words are usually understood and produced faster than low-frequency words. Although the effect of word frequency is a reliable phenomenon in many domains of language processing, it remains unclear whether and how frequency affects pronominal anaphoric resolution. We evaluated this issue by means of two self-paced reading experiments. Native speakers of Spanish read sentences containing the anaphoric noun or pronoun at the subject syntactic position (Experiment 1) or at the object syntactic position (Experiment 2) while the antecedent of the anaphor was either a high-frequency or a low-frequency word. Results showed that nominal anaphors were read faster when referring to high-frequency than to low-frequency antecedents, and faster when referring to subjects than to objects. Critically, pronoun reading times were unaffected by the frequency and by the syntactic position of the antecedent. These results are congruent with theories assuming that syntactic information of the words is not frequency sensitive.

The aim of this study was to describe the translation and adaptation of the BIRT personality questionnaires for the Italian population. This included the replication of validity testing and the collection of normative data. Following translation and adaptation according to cross-cultural guidelines, the questionnaires were administered as a pre-test to a sample of 20 healthy subjects and then to 10 patients. The questionnaires were then administered to 120 healthy subjects equally distributed by sex, education, and age, to collect normative data from an Italian population. The questionnaires were easily administered to both healthy subjects and patients. Statistical analysis on normative data was conducted to find the mean value for each questionnaire. This study lays the foundations for using a new instrument to assess behavioral changes after acquired brain injury on the Italian population.

A large body of evidence indicates that the age at which a word is acquired predicts the time required to retrieve that word during speech production. Here we explored whether age of acquisition also predicts the experience of being unable to produce a known word at a particular moment. Italian speakers named a sequence of pictures in Experiment 1 or retrieved a word as a response to a definition in Experiment 2. In both experiments, the participants were instructed to indicate when they were in a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state. Generalized mixed-effects models performed on the TOT and correct responses revealed that word frequency and age of acquisition predicted the TOT states. Specifically, low-frequency words elicited more TOTs than did high-frequency words, replicating previous findings. In addition, late-acquired words elicited more TOTs than did early-acquired words. Further analyses revealed that the age of acquisition was a better predictor of TOTs than was word frequency. The effects of age of acquisition were similar with subjective and objective measures of age of acquisition, and persisted when several psycholinguistic variables were taken into consideration as predictors in the generalized mixed-effects models. We explained these results in terms of weaker semantic-to-phonological connections in the speech production system for late-acquired words.

How are lexical representations retrieved during sign production? Similar to spoken languages, lexical representation in sign language must be accessed through semantics when naming pictures. However, it remains an open issue whether lexical representations in sign language can be accessed via routes that bypass semantics when retrieval is elicited by written words. Here we address this issue by exploring under which circumstances sign retrieval is sensitive to semantic context. To this end we replicate in sign language production the cumulative semantic cost: The observation that naming latencies increase monotonically with each additional within-category item that is named in a sequence of pictures. In the experiment reported here, deaf participants signed sequences of pictures or signed sequences of Italian written words using Italian Sign Language. The results showed a cumulative semantic cost in picture naming but, strikingly, not in word naming. This suggests that only picture naming required access to semantics, whereas deaf signers accessed the sign language lexicon directly (i.e., bypassing semantics) when naming written words. The implications of these findings for the architecture of the sign production system are discussed in the context of current models of lexical access in spoken language production., (© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

A central issue in research on speech production is whether or not the retrieval of words from the mental lexicon is a competitive process. An important experimental paradigm to study the dynamics of lexical retrieval is the blocked naming paradigm, in which participants name pictures of objects that are grouped by semantic category ('homogenous' or 'related' blocks) or not grouped by semantic category ('heterogeneous' or 'unrelated' blocks). Typically, pictures are repeated multiple times (or cycles) within both related and unrelated blocks. It is known that participants are slower in related than in unrelated blocks when the data are collapsed over all within-block repetitions. This semantic interference effect, as observed in the blocked naming task, is the strongest empirical evidence for the hypothesis of lexical selection by competition. Here we show, contrary to the accepted view, that the default polarity of semantic context effects in the blocked naming paradigm is facilitation, rather than interference. In a series of experiments we find that interference arises only when items repeat within a block, and only because of that repetition: What looks to be 'semantic interference' in the blocked naming paradigm is actually less repetition priming in related compared to unrelated blocks. These data undermine the theory of lexical selection by competition and indicate a model in which the most highly activated word is retrieved, regardless of the activation levels of nontarget words. We conclude that the theory of lexical selection by competition, and by extension the important psycholinguistic models based on that assumption, are no longer viable, and frame a new way to approach the question of how words are retrieved in spoken language production.

Introduction: Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) has been approved for the treatment of refractory epilepsy when resective surgery is not possible, and has proved to be highly effective. Series published in the literature suggest a beneficial effect of VNS in the treatment of migraine., Aims: To determine the degree to which headaches improve in patients with migraine after the placement of VNS to treat refractory epilepsy, and to evaluate what variables are associated with an increased chance of success with this measure., Patients and Methods: An observation-based retrospective study was conducted from 1st January 1999 until 31st December 2010. Patients with VNS for refractory epilepsy were contacted by telephone, after selecting those who fulfilled International Headache Society criteria for migraine. Data collected included age, gender, year of placement, age at onset of epilepsy and migraine, improvement of seizures and migraine, presence of migraine with aura and coexistence of anxious-depressive syndrome. Ninety-four patients with VNS were contacted and 13 patients with migraine were selected., Results: Following placement of the VNS, the number of episodes of migraine was seen to decrease by at least 50% in nine patients (69%) (p = 0.004) and there was a drop in the number of episodes of migraine in those patients who had also reduced their epileptic seizures (p = 0.012). No statistically significant associations were observed as regards sex, age, length of disease history, existence of migraine with aura or coexistence of anxious-depressive syndrome., Conclusions: VNS could have beneficial effects for patients with migraine, especially in cases that are difficult to control. Due to the type of study, these conclusions must be taken with caution. Prospective clinical studies are needed before introducing the technique into daily clinical practice.

We report two experiments that explored the linguistic locus of age-of-acquisition effects in picture naming by using a delayed naming task that involved only a low proportion of trials (25 %) while, for the large majority of the trials (75 %), participants performed another task-that is, the prevalent task. The prevalent tasks were semantic categorization in Experiment 1a and grammatical-gender decision in Experiments 1b and 2. In Experiment 1a, in which participants were biased to retrieve semantic information in order to perform the semantic categorization task, delayed naming times were affected by age of acquisition, reflecting a postsemantic locus of the effect. In Experiments 1b and 2, in which participants were biased to retrieve lexical information in order to perform the grammatical gender decision task, there was also an age-of-acquisition effect. These results suggest that part of the age-of-acquisition effect in picture naming occurs at the level at which the phonological properties of words are retrieved.

Purpose: Several studies suggest that vagal nerve stimulation (VNS) is an effective treatment for medication-resistant epileptic patients, although patients' medication was usually modified during the assessment period. The purpose of this prospective study was to evaluate the long-term effects of VNS, at 18 months of follow-up, on epileptic patients who have been on unchanged antiepileptic medication., Methods: Forty-three patients underwent a complete epilepsy preoperative evaluation protocol, and were selected for VNS implantation. After surgery, patients were evaluated on a monthly basis, increasing stimulation 0.25mA at each visit, up to 2.5mA. Medication was unchanged for at least 18 months since the stimulation was started. The outcome was analysed in relation to patients' clinical features, stimulation parameters, epilepsy type, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) results, and history of prior brain surgery., Results: Of the 43 operated patients, 63% had a similar or greater than 50% reduction in their seizure frequency. Differences in the responder rate according to stimulation intensity, age at onset of epilepsy, duration of epilepsy before surgery, previous epilepsy surgery and seizure type, did not reach statistical significance. Most side effects were well tolerated., Conclusions: 62.8% of our series of 43 medication-resistant epileptic patients experienced a significant long-term seizure reduction after VNS, even in a situation of on unchanged medical therapy. Patient characteristics predictive of VNS responsiveness remain subject to investigation. Controlled studies with larger sample sizes, on VNS for patients with medication-resistant epilepsy on unchanged medication, are necessary to confirm VNS efficacy for drug-resistant epilepsy, and to identify predictive factors., (Copyright © 2012 British Epilepsy Association. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Our review of the literature is basically focused on the primary prophylaxis of early seizures after surgery of cerebral supratentorial tumors, with the aim of suggesting several recommendations in medical antiepileptic treatment to avoid this kind of seizures which occur immediately after surgery. In conclusion, it is recommended to provide criteria for prophylaxis of early seizures after surgery of cerebral supratentorial tumors. It́s recommended a one week treatment with antiepileptic drugs in patients who didńt have seizures jet, starting immediately after the surgical treatment. If seizures appear during progress of the disease, a large period treatment will be needed. Preferred antiepileptic treatment is intravenous and with a low interactions profile. Levetiracetam, followed by valproic acid seem to be most appropriated drugs due to their properties and protective effects, particularly for our patients requirements. These recommendations are considered a general proposal to effective clinical management of early seizures after surgery, not taking into account the single circumstances of our patients. Always, clinical features of the patients could modify even significantly these guides in the benefit of each patient., (Copyright © 2011 Sociedad Española de Neurocirugía. Published by Elsevier España. All rights reserved.)

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that affects 1-2% of the population. Despite the available treatments (drug therapy, resective surgery, vagus nerve stimulation), there is a significant subgroup of patients that continues to have disabling seizures. The indications of deep brain stimulation are exponentially growing, and there is a wide experience with deep brain stimulation (DBS) for the treatment of abnormal movements. DBS for epilepsy may be a new therapy for the subgroup of patients that remain disabled despite other treatments. Experiments with animal models, and the new advances in our knowledge about the neurophysiological processes that govern the genesis of epilepsy, have led to the selection of various brain targets for stimulation. The thalamus is a fundamental relay centre in the corticothalamic and corticostriatal thalamocortical circuits, and it has been studied with this purpose. Studies on epileptic patients have shown various degrees of effectiveness; however, controlled studies do not permit definitive conclusions about the role of DBS in the treatment of epilepsy. Probably a better patient selection would lead to more decisive conclusions. Further randomised studies are needed to draw reliable conclusions and scientific evidence on the effectiveness of DBS for refractory epilepsy.

Introduction: It is necessary to know the degree of concordance of preoperative studies in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). AIM. To analyze the relative importance of different preoperative tests (vEEG, EEG, SPECT and MRI), the degree of agreement between them, and to develop a Bayesian probability model for diagnosis., Patients and Methods: We analyzed 73 patients operated by TLE, with a minimum postoperative follow-up of two years. To analyze the localization capability of different test, we used only patients with an Engel's grade I outcome during all the follow-up time (n = 60)., Results: Engel's grades percentages at 2 years were 87.7/8.2/3.0/0.0 (I/II/III/IV, respectively). The preoperative correlation was < 50% for three tests and 33% for the four. MRI studies were found normal in 33.3% of cases. According to the localization index, the arrange was vEEG > RM > SPECT > EEG. The conditional probability of correct localization for a test was vEEG (0.950) > EEG (0.719) > SPECT (0.717) > RM (0.683). Concordance for more than two tests, was = 0.587 (vEEG + MRI). The probability of obtaining a priori correct localization was vEEG (0.983) > RM (0.414) > EEG (0.285) > SPECT (0.209). The Bayesian model is highly reliable., Conclusions: Probably it is not always possible to obtain a high degree of agreement among preoperative test, despite this, it is possible to obtain a good functional result. The most effective test is the vEEG.

The cumulative semantic cost describes a phenomenon in which picture naming latencies increase monotonically with each additional within-category item that is named in a sequence of pictures. Here we test whether the cumulative semantic cost requires the assumption of lexical selection by competition. In Experiment 1 participants named a sequence of pictures, while in Experiment 2 participants named words instead of pictures, preceded by a gender marked determiner. We replicate the basic cumulative semantic cost with pictures (Exp. 1) and show that there is no cumulative semantic cost for word targets (Exp. 2). This pattern was replicated in Experiment 3 in which pictures and words were named along with their gender marked definite determiner, and were intermingled within the same experimental design. In addition, Experiment 3 showed that while picture naming induces a cumulative semantic cost for subsequently named words, word naming does not induce a cumulative semantic cost for subsequently named pictures. These findings suggest that the cumulative semantic cost arises prior to lexical selection and that the effect arises due to incremental changes to the connection weights between semantic and lexical representations., (2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) was introduced as a novel method for the treatment of patients with medically and/or surgically refractory epilepsy. VNS typically involves placement of the electrode on the left vagus nerve. However, there are some patients who cannot be implanted on this side because of complications related to the surgical procedure or side effects or infections forcing the left side VNS (L-VNS) explant. Because right side VNS (R-VNS) implants have shown similar effectiveness compared to L-VNS in reducing the frequency of seizures in animal models, treatment with R-VNS should be considered in patients who may not tolerate L-VNS. We present two adult patients who underwent R-VNS. One of the patients improved dramatically after L-VNS, but the device had to be removed because of mechanical malfunction. This patient was thought to be at high risk for nerve injury if L-VNS reimplantation was done, thus R-VNS was chosen. In the other patient, L-VNS was first attempted, but the operation had to be stopped due to significant bleeding caused by the accidental tearing of an ectopic vein. Both patients had a marked reduction in their seizure activity and none of them had cardiac side effects from therapeutic R-VNS. We conclude that R-VNS therapy is an alternative, promising therapy for reducing seizure activity in those patients who cannot undergo L-VNS implantation. Close follow-up and frequent ECG monitoring is required to detect the presence of cardiac side effects., (Copyright (c) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Several naming studies show that distractor pictures, even when intentionally ignored by the speaker, are still capable of activating their respective phonological representations. However results from word translation studies suggest that distractor pictures are only conceptually activated. Here we tested the reliability of the word translation results. In four experiments, bilingual participants translated words from one language to the other one while ignoring the presentation of pictures. In Experiment 1a phonological related pictures sped up translation latencies. However, the effect disappeared when the percentage of related trials was reduced (Experiment 1b). In Experiment 2a translation latencies were faster when the words were accompanied by semantically related pictures than by unrelated pictures. Importantly, the effect was still reliable when the proportion of related trials was reduced and the total number of semantic categories was increased (Experiment 2b). Theoretical implications of the influence of distractor pictures during speech production are discussed.

Previous research by Dupoux et al. [Dupoux, E., Pallier, C., Sebastián, N., & Mehler, J. (1997). A destressing "deafness" in French? Journal of Memory Language 36, 406-421; Dupoux, E., Peperkamp, S., & Sebastián-Gallés (2001). A robust method to study stress' deafness. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 110, 1608-1618.] found that French speakers, as opposed to Spanish ones, are impaired in discrimination tasks with stimuli that vary only in the position of stress. However, what was called stress 'deafness' was only found in tasks that used high phonetic variability and memory load, not in cognitively less demanding tasks such as single token AX discrimination. This raised the possibility that instead of a perceptual problem, monolingual French speakers might simply lack a metalinguistic representation of contrastive stress, which would impair them in memory tasks. We examined a sample of 39 native speakers of French who underwent formal teaching of Spanish after age 10, and varied in degree of practice in this language. Using a sequence recall task, we observed in all our groups of late learners of Spanish the same impairment in short-term memory encoding of stress contrasts that was previously found in French monolinguals. Furthermore, using a speeded lexical decision task with word-nonword minimal pairs that differ only in the position of stress, we found that all late learners had much difficulty in the use of stress to access the lexicon. Our results show that stress 'deafness' is better interpreted as a lasting processing problem resulting from the impossibility for French speakers to encode contrastive stress in their phonological representations. This affects their memory encoding as well as their lexical access in on-line tasks. The generality of such a persistent suprasegmental 'deafness' is discussed in relation to current findings and models on the perception of non-native phonological contrasts.

We evaluated whether lexical selection in speech production is affected by word frequency by means of two experiments. In Experiment 1 participants named pictures using utterances with the structure "pronoun + verb + adjective". In Experiment 2 participants had to perform a gender decision task on the same pictures. Access to the noun's grammatical gender is needed in both tasks, and therefore lexical selection (lemma retrieval) is required. However, retrieval of the phonological properties (lexeme retrieval) of the referent noun is not needed to perform the tasks. In both experiments we observed faster latencies for high-frequency pictures than for low-frequency pictures. This frequency effect was stable over four repetitions of the stimuli. Our results suggest that lexical selection (lemma retrieval) is sensitive to word frequency. This interpretation runs against the hypothesis that a word's frequency exerts its effects only at the level at which the phonological properties of words are retrieved.